


A Very Hamilton Halloween

by fiftysevenacademics (rapiddescent)



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Colonialism, Halloween, M/M, Slavery, caribbean ghosts, ghost story, hamilton will impress his friends with actual supernatural encounters from his childhood, jumbies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-01
Updated: 2016-11-01
Packaged: 2018-08-28 09:53:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8441149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rapiddescent/pseuds/fiftysevenacademics
Summary: Hamilton pulls out all the stops to win a ghost story telling competition.





	

“And ‘e was never ‘eard frrrom agayn,” breathed Lafayette, holding the candle under his chin. His eyes burned out of the darkness, and the flame threw the shadow of his fluffy hair against the wall like an enormous cloud of smoke. He held the position briefly, glancing on either side to gauge his effect.

Hamilton laughed.

“Maybe it would’ve been scarier if we’d let you tell it in French.”

“I did feel like something was creeping up behind me at one point,” offered Laurens with a grin that gave lie to his fear. “But it was just Hamilton tapping my back to make me think a spider was crawling up it.”

Hamilton laughed hard enough to shake a few strands of jet black hair out of his ponytail. Lafayette shoved the candle toward him with a haughty expression."

“All right Monsieur le Critique! Take your turn. We will see if Le Petit Lion can bite as ‘ard as ‘e rroars.”

Hamilton stretched to take the candle, then reclined dramatically back into his cot.

He said nothing, just watched the flame settle back into place and a few drops of wax roll down the side of the taper to congeal on his thumbnail. His silence drew their attention and for a few seconds nothing but the furtive rustling of some small animal in the bushes outside the tent filled the space between them. Still staring at the flame, Hamilton spoke in a distant, distracted voice.

"You may with some rightness have assumed that I speak seldom of the sad event which left me alone in the world because of the sadness it summons to my heart. Indeed, the memory of those bleak days and the misery that followed fills me with an almost unbearable grief. But that is not the reason I talk rarely of it. To tell the true tale of my orphaning requires the audience to stretch their minds wide enough to receive an ancient, otherwordly terror for which our language has no words, and our religion no succor."

Hamilton paused and turned from the candle to lock eyes with Lafayette and Laurens, who watched with soft faces.

"I keep it to myself for your protection."

The bushes outside stopped shivering with an audible, plaintive squeak.

Lafayette and Laurens flinched.

"I tried not to believe the stories I heard, the stories all white people hear in the Caribbean but always dismiss as the idle talk of superstitious slaves far too susceptible to pagan newcomers from Africa. And yet, as I went about helping my mother with her shop, running errands and staying up late to balance her books, at all turns I was on alert against jumbies. If I saw an unfamiliar person turning a corner, I shivered. If I heard a thud on the roof late at night, I ran with a candle to the uppermost room and shouted, 'Show yourself!' When I awoke in the morning, I laughed at my exhausted credulousness, my susceptibility to fables told in English Creole by enslaved people to terrify their masters. I powdered my hair, prayed, and followed my mother's instructions to turn away from her shop anyone with skin darker than tea with milk."

"Jumbies?" asked Laurens.

Hamilton ignored him and continued. 

"My mother was not a wealthy merchant. She was.." It took but a millisecond for the right word to appear on his tongue. "A businesswoman, one of only a handful in Christiansted. She depended on the generosity of her landlord and his friends, but we pretended that wasn't the case. She taught me French and constantly reminded me that my father came from Scottish nobility. We kept her shop in spotless order, serving only clientele she considered worthy.

One day a woman with dark brown, wrinkled skin and thinning, frizzy hair tucked up in her cap entered and asked if we could spare a cup of flour for a poor, old grandmother. My mother motioned for me to get her out, but I felt like my feet were nailed to the floor. I was only twelve. In the moment I hesitated, my mother's slave, Ajax, stepped forward, took her by the elbow, and led her to the door, saying,

"Mrs. Faucette doesn't run a charity."

Laurens' jaw dropped and he looked toward Hamilton with wounded eyes. 

"Yes, my mother owned two slaves," Hamilton all but whispered to Laurens.

Laurens' freckled cheeks buckled with disgust.

"Two nights later I lay in the bed I shared with my mother, drifting in and out of sleep because, as usual, I could not stop my mind."

Laurens touched his hand knowingly. Lafayette laughed.

"She was warm and soft, with one arm draped protectively around my shoulders. She snored. I don't know if I was already awake or if this woke me, or if I was even really awake at all, but I saw a bright orange light at the keyhole. It narrowed, then got brighter and brighter as it squeezed through the opening. A ball of flame sauntered this way and that around my room with a charge that stood all my hairs on end. I wanted to wake my mother but I couldn't move. Nor could I speak, or even scream. In fact, I couldn't move in spite of my urge to flee. 

Dread flooded me and I tried to raise an arm to fend it off, but found myself paralyzed by some force beyond my ken. The light settled around my mother, who seemed to actually relax in its warmth. The next morning she had a fever, and I ran the shop all day while she tossed fitfully in bed.

She never left bed after this. By the end of the day, her face lacked color, and she had not the strength even to stir sugar into the cup of tea Ajax brought her. By day I ran the shop and by night, I sat by her side, rubbing her arms and stroking her hair to bring about her few lucid moments. Occasionally I awoke at night feeling strangely warm and rolled over to see my mother's outstretched arm or exposed neck with strange new bruises, with a faint orange glow receding in the keyhole. She lost all vigor and her fever increased, but still I kept her shop running. I opened on time each morning and greeted customers all day. By night I kept the books. 

This might have gone on for days or weeks, I can't remember. But the old woman showed up again one day, this time asking for a handful of pins. I charged her, shouting, "Get lost, before we send you to your maker!" To this day I do not know why I said that, but I will never forget the way Ajax bolted the door behind her and rushed to me shouting, "Now have you done it! We are all doomed." And, even though he usually spoke perfect English, began praying in a language I couldn't understand.

After closing shop for the day, I pored over her books and prepared an order for more goods. Knowing that sleep would yet elude me for hours, I walked to her supplier's house and left the request with a servant. As I walked home, the sun slid beneath the waves and the tangerine horizon gradually faded to violet then black. There was no moon, but gradually, I realized a familiar orange light lit my path. 

I looked up. Imagine flames licking a log in a fireplace, then imagine not one, but twenty logs all at once, and you will have some idea of what I saw. I stopped and shouted, "I don't know what you are, but get away from here!" Then I ran the rest of the way to my mother's house, where I leaped under the blankets next to her and held onto her withered shoulders until I fell asleep. 

When I awoke, I felt hot and weak. My mother breathed irregularly next to me, her sweat soaking the bed linens. A foul smell filled our room. My mother, though barely sentient, noticed me, alternately sweating and shivering next to her, and held me in her arms.

"It's not a jumbie, Alex," she whispered in her coherent moments. "Jumbies don't do it like this."

And with that one sentence everything changed. What were jumbies? I didn't know, but everyone else did, even my classy French mother. I looked to Ajax, standing ready by the door, and he shook his head. 

But I no longer had health. I weakened daily and spent long hours in my mother's arms, praying with her for our recovery. At night, sometimes I felt bathed in the glow of a fire I did not build, and yielded up my arms, my neck, my thighs to its warmth. I embraced it, imagined its tongue everywhere on me.

And every time, I awoke feeling more frail. If I tried to stand, I fell back on the bed and if I so much as tried to hold a pen, I lacked the energy to move my fingers across the page. I lay all day next to my mother, who looked as if the life had been sucked out of her, and breathed shallowly, if at all. 

Ajax tended us but said little until the day my mother breathed her last and he had to pry me, sobbing with what few tears I had left, from her arms.

"The jumbie's got you, Mister Hamilton. You've got to get it back."

I recall I looked at him with a mixture of hatred and wonder, this black man who had nodded knowingly throughout my mother's illness, yet done nothing to help her. Jumbies, as everyone, black and white, as I was about to learn, are spirits of the dead, or demons, as some might say, who exist to harm the living. Perhaps Ajax felt the sins of the slaveowning mother should not be visited on her child, or perhaps he simply feared the jumbie would come next for him. 

"Empty a sack of rice in front of your door," he instructed that night. "She has to gather and count every grain." 

I did as he ordered, and when I finished, he put a small bag of salt in my hand and said, "Now we destroy her."

I followed Ajax to the outskirts of town, where we peered into hut after hut looking for the shriveled female who had drained my mother and, almost, me of our life force. Eventually, we came to a shack underneath a tree and next to a creek that bubbled brightly in the moonlight. Inside the shack we found a pile of skin with hair and fingernails that looked like the old woman in the shop. Ajax told me to put the skin in my sack of salt and take it home, where we mixed both in a mortar and pestle and pounded until a light as bright as the sun lit the sky with a scream that turned our bones to water. 

I don't remember going to bed, but when I did, my mother's body was cold and hard. We buried her and had to auction off all her property to pay her debts. I held Ajax's hand and cried, begging a jumbie to take his new master, but he just patted my head and said, "Oh, if only it worked that way."

I used to think that pat on the head was loving, but now I remember what he said and what he did and realize, even at that age, I was still his master and he surely wanted to be free, as we now want to be free from England."

The candle had burned out long ago, but Laurens and Lafayette sat, staring at Hamilton, who fidgeted with the stem of a pumpkin while rain fell gently on the canvas.

"We would all do the same, Alex. Everyone, even the dead, wants to be free," whispered Laurens, holding his hand.

**Author's Note:**

> The jumbie in this story is supposed to be a type commonly known in the US by its French name, soucouyant, although it is known by a variety of other names in the Caribbean.


End file.
